Should nations pay the price for their leaders' misdeeds?

By Ruti Teitel

Updated 11:33 AM ET, Sat July 26, 2014

Photos: Tribunals and justice after WWI5 photos

Tribunals and justice after WWI – At Versailles Palace, representatives of Germany and the Allies sign the treaty that ended World War I, June 28, 1919. Article 231, the notorious War Guilt clause, required "Germany (to) accept the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage" during the war.

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Photos: Tribunals and justice after WWI5 photos

Tribunals and justice after WWI – At the Paris Peace Conference, held earlier in 1919, some 30 nations convened to reach the terms of peace, but it was "The Big Four" who would hold sway on Versailles' terms. Left to right: Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.

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Photos: Tribunals and justice after WWI5 photos

Tribunals and justice after WWI – Versailles' collective punishment of a humiliated Germany is widely believed to have led to World War II, prompting a reorientation in international law: Guilty nations have been replaced by war criminals, prosecuted and punished by international tribunals. Here, German war crimes defendants sit in the Nuremberg courtroom of the International Tribunal after WWII. Hermann Goering, Rudolph Hess, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel (front row), and Karl Doenitz, Erich Raeder, Baldor von Schirach, Fritz Sauchel (second row).

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Tribunals and justice after WWI – Nuon Chea, a former leader in the Khmer Rouge reign of terror and right hand man to Pol Pot, gets help to stand up in the dock before a hearing in 2008 at the U.N.-backed Cambodian war crimes court in Phnom Penh. A verdict is expected in August on Chea's indictment over atrocities.

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Tribunals and justice after WWI – Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic enters the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague in 2001. Milosevic was charged with war crimes, including genocide, and crimes against humanity in connection with the wars in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. His trial, which began in 2002, ended without a verdict when he was found dead in his prison cell in 2006.

Story highlights

Teitel: Backfire changed how global community punishes war crimes: individuals, not nations

Teitel: Today age of "smart sanctions," global tribunals, such as in response to Russia, Syria

It's well known that the decision to impose collective guilt on Germany at the end of the First World War was a fateful one. But even today, 100 years after the start of the Great War, the fallout from the Treaty of Versailles affects U.S. foreign policy --from Europe to the Middle East, from Ukraine to Syria.

At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. Article 231 of the treaty, the notorious War Guilt clause, required "Germany (to) accept the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage" during the war.

The treaty forced Germany to disarm, make substantial territorial concessions and pay reparations to certain countries. The total cost was 132 billion marks, or $31.4 billion, roughly equivalent to $442 billion today.

At the time, economists, notably John Maynard Keynes, warned that the victors were imposing a brutal "Carthaginian peace," a reference to the peace imposed on Carthage by Rome 2,000 years before, which amounted to a complete crushing of the enemy and which also mandated the payment of constant tribute.

Germans' feelings of victimization and hatred of Versailles were soon exploited by Adolf Hitler. Many analysts now conclude that this miscarriage of justice, this experience of collective punishment, backfired and helped pave the road to World War II.

The discrediting of the collective guilt imposed at Versailles would result in a major reorientation in international law and policy, changes that we live with today. Guilty nations have been replaced by war criminals, prosecuted and punished by international tribunals.

After World War II, the Nuremberg trials for "crimes against the peace" were justified not in retrospective terms but in forward-looking ones--namely the peace of future generations. The postwar trials reflect that even individual responsibility is understood today less in terms of retribution than deterrence.

Just Watched

Three unexpected things from WWI

This new view of responsibility has become more and more pronounced in recent years, to the point where individuals may be held responsible, but nations are absolved.

In 1995, at the first public indictment proceeding of the architects of the Balkans ethnic cleansing policy, Chief Prosecutor Richard Goldstone declared that the proceeding of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia would establish a "public record" to "assist in attributing guilt to individuals ...and in avoiding the attribution of collective guilt to any nation or ethnic group."

In the words of the prosecutor in the very first case in the court against a member of the Serbian paramilitary force, Dusko Tadic, accused of horrendous persecution of Muslims in the Omarska detention camp, "Absolving nations of collective guilt through the attribution of individual responsibility is an essential means of countering the misinformation and indoctrination which breeds ethnic and religious hatred." (Tadic was convicted of, among other things, crimes against humanity.)

Such international justice via individual accountability would break "old cycles of ethnic retribution" and thus by displacing vengeance would advance reconciliation. The court was considered to be critical to restoring the peace in the region.

This emphasis on individual responsibility was crowned with the establishment of the permanent International Criminal Court in 2000. Deterrence is the clear goal in the ICC preamble. It declares that "during this century millions of children, women and men have been victims of unimaginable atrocities that deeply shock the conscience of humanity," and expresses the Court's determination to "put an end to impunity for the perpetrators of these crimes and thus to contribute to the prevention of such crimes."

Photos: World War I 25 photos

Photos: World War I 25 photos

World War I: A time of upheaval – French soldiers sing the national anthem at the beginning of World War I in August 1914. This "war to end all wars" might seem like ancient history, but it changed the world forever. It transformed the way war was fought, upended cultures and home life and stimulated innovations that affect us today. With more than 30 combatant nations and nearly 70 million men mobilized, World War I profoundly destabilized the international order. Look back at some of the war's key events.

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Photos: World War I 25 photos

World War I: A time of upheaval – The bodies of Austria-Hungary Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, are seen after their assassination by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914. The assassination led Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia, starting a chain of events that would gradually bring other nations into the fray.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – Germans in Berlin mobilize for war on August 1, 1914. Germany was a strong ally of Austria-Hungary.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – French soldiers are seen at a front-line trench in Italy. During World War I, the Allied Powers consisted of Belgium, France, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Montenegro, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia and the United States. The Central Powers consisted of Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, and Ottoman Empire (now Turkey).

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World War I: A time of upheaval – German soldiers captured by the British are seen in France.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – Men visit the graves of French soldiers killed in the Battle of the Marne in September 1914.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – Troops land at Anzac Cove in the Dardanelles during the battle between Allied forces and Turkish forces at the Gallipoli Peninsula in February 1915. The two sides were fighting for access to the strategic Sea of Marmara and eventually to Constantinople (Istanbul).

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World War I: A time of upheaval – German and British troops are seen together during the Christmas Truce of 1914.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – These French Zouave infantrymen were killed by gas during the Second Battle of Ypres, Belgium, in April 1915.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – Germans give oxygen to a gas victim in 1915. The cloth masks worn by these soldiers provided little defense; more substantial gas masks were not produced until 1916. By the end of the war, even horses and dogs used at the front had their own gas masks.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – German U-boats, or submarines, patrol the Mediterranean coast.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – French troops rest in Verdun, France, in 1916. Verdun was the site of the longest battle of World War I.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – Dead bodies lie piled in a trench at Verdun on April 9, 1916.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – British troops advance during the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – A British tank is stranded while crossing a trench during the Battle of the Somme on September 25, 1918.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – German soldiers stand near a crashed fighter plane in Germany in 1916.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – Czar Nicholas II of Russia, right, reviews the palace guard just prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – U.S. President Woodrow Wilson addresses a joint session of Congress in April 1917, requesting a declaration of war on Germany. The United States declared war against Germany after the interception and publication of the Zimmermann Telegram and the sinking of three U.S. merchant ships by German U-boats.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – Britons stand in line outside an Army recruiting station.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – A British sergeant major instructs American soldiers in bayonet fighting at Texas' Camp Dick.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – U.S. Army troops stand in a defensive trench in France. By war's end, thousands of miles of trenches crisscrossed European battlefields.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – A defeated German army marches home on October 1, 1918.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – Armistice Day is celebrated in Chicago on November 1, 1918.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – U.S. troops returning home from France are seen on the USS Agamemnon in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1919.

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World War I: A time of upheaval – German delegates listen to French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau's speech during the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in France on June 28, 1919.

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Photos: Women during World War I 20 photos

Photos: Women during World War I 20 photos

Women during World War I – Female army recruits from the United Kingdom are seen during drills in May 1917. World War I broke down barriers between military and civilian life. With the men away in battle, women took on an extraordinary role in support of the war, whether it was on the front lines or at home in factories and farms.

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Women during World War I – Loretta Perfectus Walsh enlisted in the United States Naval Reserve in March 1917, becoming the first active-duty woman in the Navy and the first U.S. military woman who wasn't a nurse.

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Women during World War I – Women work at the Gray & Davis Co. ordnance factory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Munitions workers faced harsh working conditions that were sometimes lethal, such as in the Barnbow National Factory explosion that killed 35 near Leeds, England.

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Women during World War I – A woman works as a porter at the Marylebone station in London. British propaganda posters declaring soldiers' dependence on female munitions workers gave women a sense that their labor contributions would be important -- and acknowledged. But this was not always the case.

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Women during World War I – A Russian women's regiment from Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) relaxes in front of its tents. Women across the globe would serve directly on the battlefields, with many serving as nurses, ambulance drivers and cooks.

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Women during World War I – Maria Bochkareva, nicknamed Yashka, was a Russian soldier who in 1917 created the 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death -- an all-female combat unit.

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Women during World War I – "Hello Girls" at work. The U.S. Army trained more than 400 female telephone operators to serve in France and England for the Army Signal Corps. These women were bilingual, speaking French and English.

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Women during World War I – Grace Banker receives a Distinguished Medal of Service for her role as chief operator in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. She worked at a post close to the front lines in France.

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Photos: Women during World War I 20 photos

Women during World War I – Female firefighters put a fire escape into position in the United Kingdom.

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Women during World War I – Lenah Higbee, a Canadian-born U.S. Navy chief nurse, served as superintendent of the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps during World War I. She was the first female recipient of the Navy Cross.

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Women during World War I – Nurses tend to wounded soldiers in France in 1915.

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Women during World War I – Julia Stimson was superintendent of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps and the first woman to attain the rank of major in the Army. She earned the Distinguished Service Medal for her service in France.

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Women during World War I – Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker drive an ambulance in July 1917. The two British women ran a first-aid post in Belgium only 100 yards from the trenches.

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Photos: Women during World War I 20 photos

Women during World War I – Milunka Savic was a Serbian combatant and the most decorated female fighter in the history of warfare. She was honored by multiple countries for her bravery.

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Women during World War I – Mary Sophia Allen inspects policewomen in London in May 1915. Before the war, Allen had been imprisoned three times for her activism as a suffragette. She turned down an offer of wartime service with a Needlework Guild to become the second in command of the Women Police Service.

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Women during World War I – A member of the Women's Forestry Corps, part of the Women's Land Army in the United Kingdom, works circa 1916.

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Women during World War I – Women "navvies" work on railway building in Coventry, England.

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Women during World War I – Dorothy Lawrence disguised herself as a man in order to become an English soldier in World War I.

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Women during World War I – A female munitions worker welds at an armaments factory.

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Women during World War I – A British Army lieutenant sits in a garden with his wife and three children while on leave during the war. In Great Britain and the United States, women confronted wartime shortages of food, fuel and housing as they struggled to maintain homes and families while they also worked outside the home.

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Photos of WWI's "Bionic Men" 10 photos

Photos of WWI's "Bionic Men"10 photos

WWI's "Bionic Men" – The scale and type of physical injuries endured by soldiers injured in World War One challenged the ingenuity of prosthesis designers, whose work to replace lost body parts would let many return to productive civilian life, a process echoed today with soldiers injured in our recent wars. Here Austro-Hungarian soldiers practice walking with artificial legs at the First War Hospital, Budapest. See gallery showing the effects of the war.

WWI's "Bionic Men" – Postcard of British soldiers using parallel bars to help them learn to walk with their artificial legs. Image was probably taken at Queen Mary's Convalescent Auxiliary Hospital, a specialized orthopedic hospital that opened in London in 1915.

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WWI's "Bionic Men" – A disabled German ex-serviceman works as a carpenter with the aid of a prosthetic arm, Germany, circa 1919.

WWI's "Bionic Men" – German man riding a bicycle using prostheses on both arms and legs. Photo by Dr. P. A. Smithe, American Red Cross surgeon at the Vienna Red Cross Hospital, 1914-1915.

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WWI's "Bionic Men" – An artificial limb maker at work in Berlin in 1919. Prosthetics were perhaps Berlin's busiest industry after the carnage of the Great War.

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WWI's "Bionic Men" – Wounded veterans with their prostheses, 1916.

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Photos: WWI chemical weapons 8 photos

Photos: WWI chemical weapons8 photos

Chemical weapons in World War I – World War I ushered in an era of chemical weapons use that lingers, lethally, into the present day. About 1 million casualties were inflicted, and 90,000 were killed. Here, French troops wear an early form of gas mask in the trenches during the first widespread use of gas, by the Germans at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1916.

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Chemical weapons in World War I – French soldiers making a gas and flame attack on German trenches in Flanders, Belgium, in 1918. German forces were the first to open valves on gas cylinders, releasing the toxic cloud on unprepared French troops in Ypres in 1915.

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Chemical weapons in World War I – The bodies of hundreds of Italian soldiers are strewn across the battlefield, victims of a gas and flame attack during World War I, as others haul the wounded on stretchers. They were members of the Ninth Italian Regiment of the Queen's Brigade.

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Chemical weapons in World War I – Early gas masks were often ineffectual. The Germans and Americans would ultimately be the most successful in creating barriers to lethal gases. A German soldier shows how to wear one version.

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Chemical weapons in World War I – A soldier demonstrates an ungainly French gas mask. "French masks were notoriously unreliable," wrote historian Gerald Fitzgerald.

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Chemical weapons in World War I – A German cavalry unit with both horses and soldiers wearing gas masks advances during the Second Battle of the Aisne at Soissons, France, in June 1918.

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Chemical weapons in World War I – A German soldier wears a more rudimentary gas mask in 1915. Although the Germans were first to deploy chemical weapons in the war, both sides were soon routinely using chlorine and other gases in battle.

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Chemical weapons in World War I – Men of the British Army's 55th Division, blinded by a poison gas attack, in April 1918. British soldier Wilfred Owen captured the panic of an attack in verse "Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound'ring like a man on fire or lime."

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The United Nations also shifted away from collective punishment toward smart sanctions that target individuals with economic and other punitive measures, ordered by the U.N. Security Council, and not entire countries. Indeed, one can see how this shift affects policy today toward Russia over its meddling in Ukraine and toward Syria, where in both instances international response has taken the form of international sanctions as well as international criminal justice, both responses eschewing collective punishment.

In Syria, for example: This May the French sponsored a resolution to Security Council members that would have given the ICC jurisdiction over crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Syria during its ongoing civil war. The United States was among the many Security Council members to support the referral, but the action would ultimately be blocked by China and Russia in a Security Council vote earlier this summer.

Likewise, the Russian incursion into Crimea might in the past have raised Cold War tensions and provoked a collective punishment on the entire nation, but the response of the United States and the European Union illustrates the approach of individualizing responsibility: While the sanctions have been progressively expanded and tightened in response to ongoing events (the latest being the downing of the Malaysia Airlilnes jet over Ukraine), the companies and individuals targeted have been clearly selected on the basis of their proximity-- those who may be making or supporting the specific decisions relating to Ukraine.

Still, such sanctions can only work if the international community hangs together, and the temptation for the world's major military powers to revert to the rhetoric of retribution can be almost overwhelming—one might say even that the Obama administration fell victim to it late last year calling for accountability and an end to impunity for the Bashar al-Assad regime as a basis for U.S. military intervention.

But the anniversary of the Great War and its Armistice can serve as a reminder that retribution against a people or society breeds a sense of injustice and indeed may be intrinsically unfair. Rather than a just settlement to war, it may serve only to perpetuate conflict.

It began 100 years ago, but World War I is no remote event. Its carnage and tumult changed our world, shifting borders, upending culture, home life, language and spurring a raft of innovation, says Ruth Ben-Ghiat